The inside of an old upright piano, is recycled into a kinetic sound sculpture. Videos of birds are projected directly onto the piano to provide an ever-changing musical score. The movement of the birds trigger small machines to twitch and flutter on the piano strings. In this work, nature controls machines to create delicate music.

16 wooden houses/bird boxes, containing sound stores encoded with nightingale sounds.Turning wind vanes made from goose feathers play small cut up sections of the nightingale song, varying in speed and duration with the dynamics of the wind.

Life size bird outlines (0.5m x 0.25m) of lapwings in various stages of flight during a mating display; each of these has been drawn in electroluminescent wire. Sequenced 1-16 to form an animation, which moves from top-bottom-top in an undulating loop.

Pretty Polly copy WP

Feather Dervish

Artist: Mark Anderson

Spinning feathers with shifting speed and forms.

Cuckoo Ensemble

Artist: Jony Easterby

A collection of nine cuckoo whistle mechanisms activated by electric motors, housed in brass cage structures and spread out along 100m of wetland boardwalk. Each motor turns a twin cam mechanism that plays the interval of the CUK-OO cuckoo call. Each motor is set to a different speed causing a spatial and aural field of random call and response.

For the Birds is continuing its migrations across the UK and to indeed to other continents in 2018/19. We have some very exciting locations and possibilities in the pipeline as festivals and promoters are working hard in the back ground to make this show happen again.

Watch this space for the next showing, which will be happening in the North of England this November. Yet to be announced please get in touch if you need to know any further information.

Brighton Festival 2017

For the Birds took flight to the Brighton Festival 2017 and invited a visiting public on a meditative and immersive journey through a secret South Downs woodland location. A self-guided journey through a wild landscape after the onset of darkness, whilst transformed by a series of up to thirty bespoke light and sound installations produced by some of the most dynamic sound artists currently working in the UK.

For the Birds was staged over four weeks with 17 shows attended by up to 1300 people each night. The show broke the box office record at the Brighton Festival attracting over 15,000 people to marvel at the beauties and poignancy of the installations, immersed in the forest at night

Originally staged at RSPB Ynys-hir reserve in Wales as part of an NT Wales /ACW development project, For the Birds also went on to become the audience highlight of the New Zealand Festival 2016, where it attracted more than 13,000 people over the festival.

As transient and light as the birds themselves, the installations have been created using a mixture of low tech, low power equipment suitable for remote places, using low energy lighting, small scale multi-speaker systems, low volt micro processors, electro-acoustic instruments, performances, projections and kinetic sculptures the artists celebrate the birds in song, movement and light.

‘For The Birds is an original and richly enjoyable experience and reminded this writer that such free-form art can be glorious. This kind of beauty is not generated in golf clubs by Tories, by those who think material wealth is the game of life. It blossoms on the fringes, away from the endless pursuit of money, created by the kind of people Daily Mailers might regard as excess to purpose. It is a small oasis of strange, contemplative, other-worldly loveliness in a land increasingly ruled by banal norms.’